THE GENUINE ARTICLE

The strange case of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

“This is not an autobiographical novel,” an author’s note warns at the start of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me” (Overlook; $13.95), by the British author Kyril Bonfiglioli. “It is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer.” The dealer in question, Charlie Mortdecai, is also an occasional art thief, and at the opening of the novel there is an old gilt frame burning in the fireplace of his Mayfair penthouse, a Goya stolen from the Prado possibly hidden under his valuable Savonnerie rug, and, standing more or less on the rug, a hated antagonist from a special branch of the police:

Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly. . . . Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor ’31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn’t notice: score two to me.

This is the quintessential Mortdecai voice: arch and insufferably, authoritatively snobbish. The effortless brio of Mortdecai’s narration and the outrageousness of his prejudices have insured a following for the Mortdecai novels even while they have been out of print, and have led to their revival nearly twenty years after the death of their author. In England, Kyril Bonfiglioli’s three main novels have been available as a Penguin paperback trilogy for a few years. Here, Overlook Press is starting out with just the first novel, “Don’t Point That Thing at Me,” perhaps anxious about the possible effects of exposing the American reading public to too much Mortdecai all at once.

One reason that Bonfiglioli’s books have never quite found the readership they deserve is that, although they are ostensibly crime novels, they are far too badly behaved—too full of improbability and capricious digression—to please crime fans. The plot of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me” (first published in 1973) is too complicated to be properly explained, and much too silly. Briefly, Mortdecai arranges the theft of the Goya for an American oil tycoon who has also become involved in blackmailing someone high up in the British government. Pretty soon, the secret services of Britain and America, and maybe even the associates of the tycoon, want Mortdecai dead, for various reasons. As chaotic as it is, this plot looks positively Aristotelian compared with that of the sequel, “After You with the Pistol” (1979), a teetering construction involving Chinese tongs, white slavers, and a plot to kill the Queen of England.

Though Bonfiglioli has a knack for cliffhangers, the plots are little more than excuses for displaying Mortdecai in all his dandyish glory. Mortdecai, the son of a peer, never tires of describing the splendors of his cellar, his table, and his tailoring. There is scarcely a meal (or a drink) that is not recounted in detail and meticulously evaluated, and he cannot leave the house without telling you, “I put on a dashing little tropical-weight worsted, a curly-brimmed coker and a pair of buckskins created by Lobb in a moment of genius.” He loves to boast about the fine establishments he frequents in his London neighborhood. “I went a-slumming through the art-dealing district, carefully keeping my face straight as I looked in the shop windows—sorry, gallery windows—at the tatty Shayers and reach-me-down Koekkoeks.” (It is a typical Bonfiglioli touch that the artists mentioned—precisely the kind of respectable nineteenth-century landscapists on which a high-end Mayfair dealer thrives—are just obscure enough to impress the reader.)

The novels hark back to a time when everything a gentleman needed could be obtained within a square mile of St. James’s, and Mortdecai himself, alternately pottering around the West End and shuttling around the world on dangerous missions, seems like the result of an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming. There is also a distinct debt to Raffles, the iconic gentleman thief created by the Edwardian writer E. W. Hornung. But whereas Raffles does subscribe to some code of honor (friendship, school, cricket), Mortdecai is pure self-interest and proud of it: “ ‘Idle, intelligent, devious; a survivor,’ read the summary of my character on my last school report and I have not changed.”

Mortdecai’s old-fashioned life style continually runs up against the drabness of nineteen-seventies England. Visiting his Oxford alma mater, he finds that students have scrawled Trotskyite slogans on its exterior, while a meditation on “the essential swindle of all English months” contrasts the sentimental cliché of English pastoral (“happy, sun-burned maidens prancing on a village green”) with the modern reality: “the pallid and pimply village maiden of today is waving her lumpish hips in a discotheque in the nearby town, munching a contraceptive pill while the rain roars down outside and the Babycham fizzes in its glass.” In his judgment, “the only month one can depend on is January, when the cold is always as promised and one can still sometimes hear the ring of skates on the frozen tarn and, if one is lucky, the shriek of a drowning skater.”

Mortdecai keeps a manservant, an ex-con named Jock, explaining that “you can’t run a fine arts business these days without a thug and Jock is one of the best in the trade.” Jock’s coarseness makes the perfect foil for Mortdecai’s sophistication, although Mortdecai is, to his credit, far too accomplished a snob to be snobbish in a narrow way. He describes Jock’s fry-ups as lovingly as he does the Oysters Mornay at Wilton’s, and on one occasion, finding himself behind bars, he even contrives to avoid bail because he has heard that the fish cakes served in the prison on Friday evenings are renowned. Much of the comedy of the novels derives from the way Mortdecai applies the rules and rhetoric of connoisseurship to such matters as combat (“I popped the heel of my hand under his nose—so much better than a punch”), gesture (“Mrs Spon flounced over to the window. I know lots of men who can flounce, but Mrs Spon is the last woman who can do it”), and sex:

Bed . . . is not at all a good place for sex: sex should take place in armchairs, or in bathrooms, or on lawns which have been brushed but not too recently mown, or on sandy beaches if you happen to have been circumcised. If you are too tired to have intercourse except in bed you are probably too tired anyway and should be husbanding your strength. Women are the great advocates of sex in bed because they have bad figures to hide (usually) and cold feet to warm (always). Boys are different, of course. But you probably knew that.

In Mortdecai’s world, there is an art to everything, and probably a science, too, even when it comes to reading the books. Each chapter of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me” bears an epigraph from a poem by Browning (or, in subsequent books, by Tennyson, Swinburne, and Wyatt), and a teasing author’s note explains that one epigraph is a “palpable forgery.” The business of figuring out which (no extensive knowledge of Browning is required) draws the reader into Mortdecai’s never-ending game of one-upmanship. A number of obscure jokes fulfill a similar function, as when Mortdecai complains to a bothersome policeman about a “touch of proctalgia”: “He didn’t ask what it meant; just as well, really.” (“Pain in the ass” is the insult lurking behind this.) Some of the jokes seem to be deliberately un-gettable: “I always maintained that relating one’s dreams is the third most boring thing a man can do. I need not tell you what the other two are.”

In a recent memoir about Kyril Bonfiglioli, his wife of ten years, Margaret Bonfiglioli, writes of her amazement when fans display “complete confidence that he was a rich high-living connoisseur who spent most of his time toddling about St. James’s.” Even friends found it hard not to conflate the character and the author—his own editor, in correspondence, once mixed up the two—and it seems to have been an effect he strove for. On the dust jackets of his books, he would typically describe himself as “an accomplished fencer, a fair shot with most weapons,” or “abstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco and talking.” Like Mortdecai, Bonfiglioli was an art dealer with exquisite taste and vast reserves of specialized knowledge, and, like Mortdecai, he enjoyed living in style, ate well, and drank too much. Unlike Mortdecai, he was perpetually broke—he seems to have spent his entire adult life in debt—and struggled to support a large family, eventually abandoning both struggle and family.

Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England in 1928, the son of an Italo-Slovene immigrant who dealt in antiquarian books; one of Kyril’s earliest memories was of his father showing him a copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America.” During the Second World War, the family was evacuated after ordnance fell in the back garden, and, in 1943, Bonfiglioli’s mother and eight-year-old younger brother were killed in a direct hit on their air-raid shelter. Bonfiglioli, who was fourteen, should have been in the shelter himself but was playing in the street; the incident apparently left him with the conviction that the good perish and the mischievous survive. It was he who had to give the news to his father, whose reaction he later recalled as “If only it had been you!”

As a young man, after the war, Bonfiglioli served in the Army and was an inter-regimental sabre champion. He married, but his wife died shortly after the birth of their second child. Two years later, a twenty-seven-year-old father of two, and largely an autodidact, he went to study English at Balliol College. Oxford, the town where he lived for the next decade and a half, is well endowed with eccentrics, but even today, nearly forty years after he left, mention of Bonfiglioli—known to one and all as Bon—brings forth anecdotes. The poet Craig Raine recalls his “real if faltering charisma” and likens him to “a great musical touring the provinces—a master of ceremonies whose sequins were beginning to fall off.”

At Oxford, he met his second wife, Margaret, with whom he would have three more children. After graduation, he worked at the Ashmolean Museum as an assistant to the art historian Edgar Wind, a job in which he manifested an astonishing visual memory; around the same time, he started dealing art, and, in 1960, he set up his own company, Bonfiglioli Limited. His wife recalls the extraordinary shifting contents of a home in which everything was potential stock—antique firearms, Dutch marquetry, Chinese porcelain, and dozens of stuffed birds in a questionable state of preservation, which Bon had bought from a Welsh natural-history museum, convinced that they were a bargain. As a dealer, Bon was resourceful. One day, he saw someone clearing out empty bottles from the cellars of All Souls College and offered to take them off his hands, having noticed that they were highly salable eighteenth-century bottles bearing the college arms in molded glass. The highlight of his career came in 1964, when he managed to buy a Tintoretto at a country auction for forty pounds.

Bonfiglioli’s novels are every bit as crammed with precious clutter as his house was. He delights in revealing art-world tricks of the trade, as when Mortdecai explains the work of a liner (who can remove a painting from one canvas and transfer it to another), or goes to the auction of one of his own pictures, bids it up to the amount he paid for it, and rejoices when it is sold at a much higher price to someone he dislikes. Behind all this gamesmanship hovers the suggestion that the art business, for all its vaunted sophistication, is never more than one step away from outright fraud. Mortdecai will contentedly spend “a useful afternoon with my ultra-violet machine and a grease crayon, mapping the passages of repaint (‘strengthening’ as we call it in the trade) on a gorgeous panel by—well, more or less by—the Allunno di Amico di Sandro. (God bless Berenson, I say.)”

The start of Bonfiglioli’s writing career coincided roughly with the end of his career as a dealer and the end of his marriage, though what caused what is hard to say. In the mid-sixties, when Bonfiglioli Limited was at its height, he was the editor of a couple of small science-fiction magazines for which he wrote occasional items. The huge Victorian house in which he and his family lived was filled with lodgers, an arrangement that brought in extra income and fed Bon’s hyperactive gregariousness. He was a master of impromptu parties, games, and practical jokes. Yet behind this aura of manic festivity—Falstaff played at 45 r.p.m.—some of his friends saw sadness, restlessness, and a fear of being alone. Sociability also masked an incipient drinking problem, not to mention a fair bit of philandering.

Margaret Bonfiglioli recalls her husband toward the end of their marriage shyly showing her the first few pages of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me.” By then, he’d become involved with Judith Todd, a former secretary of his, and after the divorce, in 1969, they moved into her house in the Lancashire village of Silverdale. Bon did a certain amount of casual dealing, but his art career was essentially finished; the next years were given over to the novel. By the time it was published, in 1973, the relationship with Todd, too, had ended. Filling in an author’s questionnaire for his publisher years later, he wrote, “Married again and again; one died; one I deserted; one threw me out. You can’t really want to know their names even if I could remember.” The rest of Bonfiglioli’s output was written during a steady decline. The dozen years remaining before his death were a calvary of alcoholism, depression, and poverty. He lived variously in Jersey and in Ireland (which had a policy of tax exemption for writers), sometimes alone, sometimes supported by friends, at times in utter penury. He seems to have recognized this misery as the cost of the freedom he required in order to write. In a letter to one of his sons, he advised, “Marrying a girl before you are established is like swimming the Channel with a concrete block tied to your left testicle.”

Liberated from all concrete blocks, he wrote “Something Nasty in the Woodshed” (1976), a dark follow-up which finds Mortdecai living in Jersey and investigating a series of rapes that seem to involve witchcraft; then came Mortdecai’s drug-running adventures, in “After You with the Pistol.” There was an inspired, swashbuckling prequel to the trilogy, “All the Tea in China” (1978), about Karli Van Cleef, Mortdecai’s nineteenth-century Jewish Dutch forebear, who comes to England to deal in delftware and Chinese porcelain, and then sails to China to trade opium. (Minus the opium, this family history is based on that of the famous art dealer Joseph Duveen; Bonfiglioli even snags a couple of anecdotes from S. N. Behrman’s biography, “Duveen.”) There were grand plans for a sequel to “All the Tea in China,” in which Van Cleef would get mixed up in one of the Anglo-Afghan Wars; there was a plan for a book about Van Cleef’s son (Mortdecai’s father) that would link the generations and would again make liberal use of the life of Duveen. None of these exist. One manuscript, a slightly flimsy affair called “The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery,” was left nearly finished at his death and published posthumously, completed by someone else.

Drinking may have destroyed the novelist, but it always played well in his novels. A typical Mortdecai day (and chapter) ends, “I suppose I went to bed at some stage,” and a typical morning begins, “I turned my face to the wall, feeling like a collection of passages deleted from the Book of Job.” Fortunately, Mortdecai always has Jock at hand to concoct ingenious pick-me-ups: “I must say that Drs Alka and Seltzer should have won the Nobel Prize years ago; my only quarrel with their brain-child is its noise.” Margaret Bonfiglioli believes that her ex-husband found it hard to admit the role that alcohol played in his failing health, but there is evidence that, in private, his attitude toward it was one of clinical dispassion. Among his papers at his death was an article on “Drinking and Creativity,” clipped from the British Journal on Alcohol and Alcoholism. On a list of forty-five heavy-drinking writers, Bon had inserted his own name between Berryman and Boswell, appending a marginal note: “At what age did these die?—Check.” When, in 1985, Bonfiglioli succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver, he was fifty-six.

The undertow of pain and despair is what gives the books an emotional charge beyond their surface urbanity, and makes them stick in the mind long after you’ve quoted all the funny bits to your friends. There is a moving passage toward the end of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me,” in which happiness is suddenly seen to repose in all the drab, suburban mediocrity that Mortdecai despises. Hunted down by those who want to kill him, Mortdecai flees across a darkened moor near his boyhood home in Lancashire, alone and with death an apparent certainty:

Above me and to my right shone the lights of the honest bungalow dwellers of Silverdale: I found myself envying them bitterly. It is chaps like them who have the secret of happiness, they know the art of it, they always knew it. Happiness is an annuity, or it’s shares in a Building Society; it’s a pension and blue hydrangeas, and wonderfully clever grandchildren, and being on the Committee, and just-a-few-earlies in the vegetable garden, and being alive and wonderful-for-his-age when old so-and-so is under the sod.

Silverdale is where Bonfiglioli was living when he wrote these words, a home he was about to leave, and the last home of any permanence he would have. Mortdecai concludes, “Happiness is easy: I don’t know why more people don’t go in for it.” ♦